Imagine: How Creativity Works Read online

  (Most of these patients had suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain just behind the forehead.) Because of their injuries, these poor people lived in a world of endless distractions; their focus was always fleeting. Here’s a sample problem given to the brain-damaged patients:

  IV = III + III

  The task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement becomes true. (In this example, you would move the first I to the right side of the V so that it reads VI = III + III.) Nearly 90 percent of the brain-damaged patients were able to correctly solve the puzzle, since it required a fairly obvious problem-solving approach: the only thing you have to do is change the answer. (A group of subjects without any attention deficits found the answer 92 percent of the time.) But here’s a much more challenging equation to fix:

  III = III + III

  In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Most stared at the Roman numerals for a few minutes and then surrendered. The patients who couldn’t pay attention, however, had an 82 percent success rate. This bizarre result — brain damage leads to dramatically improved performance — has to do with the unexpected nature of the solution: rotate the vertical line in the plus sign by ninety degrees, transforming it into an equal sign. (The equation is now a simple tautology: III = III = III.) The reason this puzzle is so difficult, at least for people without brain damage, has to do with the standard constraints of math problems. People are not used to thinking about the operator in an equation, so most of them quickly fix their attention on the Roman numerals. But that’s a dead end. The patients with severe cognitive deficits, by contrast, can’t restrict their search. They are forced by the brain injury to consider a much wider range of possible answers. And this is why they’re nearly twice as likely to have an insight.

  Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing.

  The unexpected benefits of not being able to focus reveal something important about creativity. Although we live in an age that worships attention — when we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate — this approach can inhibit the imagination.

  Sometimes it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. Occasionally, focus can backfire and make us fixated on the wrong answers. It’s not until you let yourself relax and indulge in distractions that you discover the answer; the insight arrives only after you stop looking for it.

  Kounios tells a story about a Zen Buddhist meditator that illustrates the importance of these alpha waves. At first, this man couldn’t solve any of the CRA problems given to him by the scientists. “This guy went through thirty or so of the verbal puzzles and just drew a blank,” Kounios says. “He assumed the way to solve the problems was to think really hard about the words on the page, to really concentrate.” But then, just as the meditator was about to give up, he started solving one puzzle after another; by the end of the experiment, he was getting them all right. It was an unprecedented streak. According to Kounios, this dramatic improvement depended on the ability of the meditator to focus on not being focused so that he could finally pay attention to all those fleeting connections in the right hemisphere. “Because he meditated ten hours a day, he had the cognitive control to instantly relax,” Kounios says. “He could ramp up those alpha waves at will, so that all of a sudden he wasn’t paying such close attention to the words on the page. And that’s when he became an insight machine.”

  2.

  While 3M’s flexible attention policy is a pillar of its innovation culture, the company doesn’t rely on relaxation and distraction alone to generate new insights. As Wendling notes, “Sometimes, you’ve got to take a more active role . . . We want to give our researchers freedom, but we also want to make sure the ideas they’re pur-36

  A L P H A W A V E S ( C O N D I T I O N B L U E ) suing are really new and worthwhile.” This is where horizontal sharing, the second essential feature of the 3M workplace, comes in. The idea is rooted in the company’s tradition of inventing new products by transplanting one concept into different domains. Just consider the invention of masking tape. Drew’s fundamental insight was that even a simple product like sandpaper — nothing but sturdy paper coated with a sticky glue — could have multiple uses; Drew realized that those same ingredients could be turned into a roll of adhesive. This led William McKnight, the executive who turned 3M into an industrial powerhouse, to insist on sharing among scientists as a core tenet of 3M culture. Before long, the Tech Forum was established, an annual event at which every researcher on staff presents his or her latest research. (This practice has also been widely imitated. Google, for instance, hosts a conference called CSI, or Crazy Search Ideas.) “It’s like a huge middle-school science fair,” Wendling says. “You see hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. The guys doing nanotechnol-ogy are talking to the guys making glue. I can only imagine what they find to talk about.”

  The benefit of such horizontal interactions — people sharing knowledge across fields — is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

  Normally, the brain files away ideas in categories based on how these ideas can be used. If you’re working for a sandpaper company, for instance, then you probably spend most of the day thinking about sandpaper as an abrasive. That, after all, is the purpose of the product. The assumption is that the vast store of mental concepts work only in particular situations and that it’s a waste of time to apply them elsewhere. There’s no point in thinking about sandpaper if you don’t need to sand something down.

  Most of the time, this assumption holds true. However, the same tendency that keeps us from contemplating irrelevant concepts also keeps us from coming up with insights. The reason is that our breakthroughs often arrive when we apply old solutions to new situations; for instance, a person thinking about sandpaper when he needs something sticky. Instead of keeping concepts separate, we start blending them together, trespassing on the standard boundaries of thought.

  The best way to understand conceptual blending is to look at the classic children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. The premise of the book is simple: Harold has a magic crayon. When he draws with this purple crayon, the drawing becomes real, although it’s still identifiable as a childish sketch. For instance, when Harold wants to go for a walk, he simply draws a path with his crayon. This fictive sketch then transforms into a real walkway, which Harold can stroll along. This magic crayon is seemingly the solution to every problem.

  But here’s the twist that makes Harold and the Purple Crayon such an engaging book: it blends together two distinct concepts of the world. Although the magic crayon is clearly a fantastical invention — a conceit that could never exist — Harold still has to obey the rules of reality. So when Harold draws a mountain and then climbs it, he must try not to slip and fall down. When he does slip — gravity exists even in this crayon universe — Harold has to draw a balloon to save himself. In other words, the book is delicate blend of the familiar and the fictional; Harold has a surreal tool, but it operates amid the usual constraints. Mark Turner, a cognitive psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, has used this children’s book to demonstrate that even little kids can easily combine two completely distinct concepts into a single idea. If they couldn’t, then the travails of Harold would make no sense.

  What does conceptual blending have to do with creativit
y? Although people take this mental skill for granted, the ability to make separate ideas coexist in the mind is a crucial creative tool. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, described this talent as the essence of the imagination:

  All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.

  Hume was pointing out that the act of invention was really an act of recombination. The history of innovation is full of inventors engaged in “compounding” and “transposing.” Johannes Guten-berg transformed his knowledge of winepresses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.) George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation. In each case, the radical concept was merely a new mixture of old ideas.

  Dick Drew was a master at conceptual blending. After he invented masking tape, a colleague told him about a strange new material called cellophane. (By this time, Drew had become a full-time researcher.) The material was translucent and shiny but also strikingly impermeable to water and grease; it was being sold by DuPont as a packaging solution, a cheap way of wrapping products for shipping. Drew took one look at the material and had another idea, which he would later describe as the insight of his life: cellophane would make a perfect adhesive. He ordered a hundred yards of cellophane and began coating the material with glue.

  Drew called it Scotch tape. By 1933, less than two years after the see-through adhesive hit the market, the product had become the most popular consumer tape in the world. Although masking tape and cellophane were completely unrelated — it had never occurred to DuPont researchers to make their wrapping material sticky — Drew saw their possible point of intersection.

  This process has been repeated again and again at 3M. For instance, the adhesive used in industrial-strength masking tape gave rise to the sound-dampening panels used in Boeing aircraft. (The material is so sticky that it even binds sound waves.) Those panels in turn gave rise to the extremely strong adhesive foam used in golf clubs, which can hold together carbon fiber and tita-nium during high impact. And the concept of Scotch tape eventually inspired another 3M engineer to invent the touch-screen technology used in smartphones. (Instead of coating cellophane, the clear glue is used to coat an electrically charged glass surface, which is then attached to a display.) After a 3M engineer noticed that Scotch tape could act like a prism, a team of scientists used their tape expertise to develop transparent films that refract light. Such films are now being widely used in laptops and LCD televisions; because they direct the brightness of each bulb outward, fewer bulbs are required on the inside, thus reducing the energy consumption of the devices by as much as 40 percent. “The lesson is that the tape business isn’t just about tape,” Wendling says. “You might think an idea is finished, that there’s nothing else to do with it, but then you talk to somebody else in some other field. And your little idea inspires them, so they come up with a brand-new invention that inspires someone else. That, in a nutshell, is our model.”

  In fact, 3M takes conceptual blending so seriously that it regularly rotates its engineers, moving them from division to division. A scientist studying adhesives might be transferred to the optical-films department; a researcher working on asthma inhalers might end up tinkering with air conditioners. Sometimes, these rotations are used as a sudden spur for innovation. If a product line is suffering from a shortage of new ideas, 3M will often bring in an entirely new team of engineers, sourced from all over the company. “Our goal is to have people switch problems every four to six years,” Wendling says. “We want to ensure that our good ideas are always circulating.”

  The benefit of such circulation is that it increases conceptual blending, allowing people to look at their most frustrating problems from a fresh perspective. Instead of trying to invent a new tack, imagine a roll of sticky paper; instead of trying to improve the battery performance of a laptop, think about the refractory properties of its light bulbs. To get a better sense of how this mental process unfolds, consider this insight puzzle, which is notoriously difficult:

  You are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed, the patient will die. There is a kind of ray machine that can be used to shoot at and destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity, the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?

  If you can’t figure out the answer, don’t worry; more than 97 percent of people conclude that the problem is impossible — the patient is doomed. However, there’s a very simple way to dramatically boost the success rate of solving this insight puzzle. It involves telling the subjects a story that seems entirely unrelated:

  A fortress was located in the center of the country. Many roads radiated out from the fortress. A general wanted to capture the fortress with his army. But he also wanted to prevent mines on the roads from destroying his army and neighboring villages. As a result, the entire army could not all go down one road to attack the fortress. However, the entire army was needed to capture the fortress; an attack by one small group could not succeed. The general therefore divided his army into several small groups. He positioned the small groups at equal distances from the fortress along different roads. The small groups simultaneously converged on the fortress. In this way the army captured the fortress.

  When the tumor puzzle was preceded by this military tale, nearly 70 percent of subjects came up with the solution. Because the subjects were able to see what the different stories had in common, they generated a moment of insight; the answer emerged from the analogy. (If you are still wondering, the solution to the doctor’s problem is to mount ten separate ray guns around the patient and set each of them to deliver 10 percent of the necessary radiation. When the ray machines are all focused on the stomach, there is enough radiation to destroy the tumor while preserving the surrounding tissue.)

  How can we get better at conceptual blending? According to Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak, the psychologists behind the tumor puzzle, the key element is a willingness to consider information and ideas that don’t seem worth considering. Instead of concentrating on the details of the problem — most people quickly fixate on tumors and rays — we should free our minds to search for distantly related analogies that can then be mapped onto the puzzles we’re trying to solve. Sometimes, the best way to decipher a medical mystery is to think about military history.

  The importance of considering the irrelevant helps explain a recent study led by neuroscientists at Harvard and the University of Toronto. The researchers began by giving a sensory test to eighty-six Harvard undergraduates. The test was designed to measure their ability to ignore outside stimuli, such as the air conditioner humming in the background or the conversation taking place in a nearby cubicle. This skill is typically seen as an essential component of productivity, since it keeps people from getting distracted by extraneous information. Their attention
is less likely to break down.

  Here’s where the data get interesting: those undergrads who had a tougher time ignoring unrelated stuff were also seven times more likely to be rated as “eminent creative achievers” based on their previous accomplishments. (The association was particularly strong among distractible students with high IQs.) According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people had difficulty filtering out the world, they ended up letting more in. Instead of approaching the problem from a predictable perspective, they considered all sorts of far-fetched analogies, some of which proved useful. (Another useful trick for inciting insights involves a quirk of language. According to an experiment led by Catherine Clement at Eastern Kentucky University, one way to consistently increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, creativity is constrained, and people struggle to find useful comparisons. However, when the same problem is recast with more generic verbs, people are suddenly more likely to uncover unexpected parallels. In some instances, Clement found, the simple act of rewriting the problem led to stun-ning improvements in the performance of her subjects. Insight puzzles that had seemed impossible — not a single person was able to solve them — were now solved more than 60 percent of the time.)

  “Creative individuals seem to remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment,” says Jordan Peterson, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto and lead author on the paper. “The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.”

  3.

  Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University, got interested in daydreaming by accident. It was the early 1990s, and Raichle was studying the rudiments of visual perception. His experiments were straightforward: A subject performed a particular task, such as counting a collection of dots, in a brain scanner. Then he or she did nothing for thirty seconds. (“It was pretty boring for the subjects,” Raichle admits. “You always had to make sure people weren’t dozing off.”) Although the scanner was still collecting data in between the actual experiments, Raichle assumed that this information was worthless noise. “We told the subjects to not think about anything,” he says. “We wanted them to have a blank mind. I assumed that this would lead to a real drop in brain activity. But I was wrong.”